Affilate marketing connects you with some of the best well-known and hidden gem products. By signing up for different affiliate marketing programs, you can generate income any time someone makes a purchase through your affiliate link.

If you are already recommending products and brands, affiliate marketing just allows you to monetize the work you are already doing!

Okay, okay. So we know it sounds awesome, but how do you get started?

Let’s begin with the easiest forms of affiliate marketing. Each of these ideas takes less than an hour to pull together. That way, affiliate marketing doesn’t fall to the bottom of your priority list.

Set a timer and you’ll see what we mean!

These tips are incredibly easy to implement, but let’s start with the easiest one.

Add affiliate links to content you’ve already published

You don’t even have to create new content to start attracting affiliate sales! Instead of starting from total scratch, look at your blog archive and scroll through the posts you’ve written. Did you mention a product that you are now an affiliate for?

I mean, maybe you would try to add advertisements to your blog sidebar back then, but solely focusing on affiliate marketing wasn’t as prevalent. Now it’s one of the main ways influencers make money online!

When you monetize your free content with affiliate marketing, you can go back and simply update old blog posts with your affiliate links. You can also make sure the information is still relevant and evergreen.

Once you go through old blog posts, use an automated pin scheduler like Tailwind and an Instagram scheduling tool like Later to help you reach more people with your archived content. Rather than always writing new blog posts, you can optimize the blog posts you’ve already written and increase their value.

Create a blog post or video tutorial on how to use the affiliate product

If you are looking through your old blog archive but don’t see many posts where you can include an affiliate product mention, this provides the perfect opportunity for you to experiment with new affiliate marketing content.

The beauty of creating new affiliate content after you’ve optimized your old content is you can start from a totally blank slate. Instead of having to work around content that already exists, you can start fresh and test out new theories and strategies.

You can create a tutorial that shows how to use the product, or you can create a comparison post that declares a winning product. You could also write a blog post about the lessons you learned while using the product or unexpected things that happened after using it.

Case studies are also a great way to create affiliate content. Case studies are unique to you, meaning that it will allow you to not only share your amazing results but will also help you create content that can’t be seen anywhere else.

There are a few things to keep in mind when you are creating affiliate content:

Add the pros and cons of the product so you give readers a fair and balanced view.

Include your recommendations for why they should love the product as much as you do.

Tell a story of a time where you used the product and it helped you do something out of the ordinary or enhanced a part of your business.

Record a tutorial or list out the step-by-step instructions for how to use the product.

Host a Facebook or Instagram Live stream featuring the affiliate product

Instead of pressuring yourself to create a full-length course around each affiliate product or host a sales webinar that takes hours to prepare, why not hop on a live video with your followers? With a Facebook Live or Instagram Live stream, you don’t have to worry about preparing slides or even practicing your speech over and over.

Instead, you can be in-the-moment and interact with your followers while you talk about the affiliate product. You don’t even need to do a full live stream about the affiliate product itself. You can simply work it into a bigger content theme so that it effortlessly fits into the conversation.

If you are a beauty blogger, you don’t have to create a live stream on “5 Makeup Products I Use Every Day”. Instead, you could share “How I Get Ready in the Morning” and highlight every part of your morning routine. Once you get to the part where you’ll talk about your everyday makeup look, you can plug the relevant affiliate products and continue talking about the rest of your tips.

It will feel more engaging if you can create a memorable story or content theme when you decide to test your affiliate marketing strategy.

Here are a few examples of how you can approach affiliate marketing on live video:

ask people who are watching live if they have bought or experienced the affiliate product

share your experience with the affiliate product using a conversational approach

tell an engaging story about how using the affiliate product helped you accomplish something or enriched your life in some way

think about giving away one of the affiliate products you want to start promoting to take advantage of building initial interest in it

include other bloggers or entrepreneurs in your live stream to talk about your different experiences with the affiliate marketing product

A Facebook or Instagram Live stream can take you as little as 5-15 minutes and even less time in preparation. Because of this, it makes it a great way to test out your affiliate marketing without feeling like it will take your whole day to do.

Create a simple Resources page on your website

Do you feel like people keep asking you for recommendations on what tools you use to run your business or where you got a specific outfit? If so, you may want to look into creating a Resources page on your website.

The beauty of a Resources page is that it not only answers more frequently asked questions for you, but it can also be a place to include your affiliate links.

What would make it onto your Resources page? It probably depends on what your niche is. If you are a wedding florist, you are bound to have a different set of resources than someone who is a marketing consultant.

No matter what you do for a living or what you are known for, we want to encourage you to create a Resources page that can act as a directory for your best-of affiliate product recommendations.

We challenge you to get started with affiliate marketing!

Choose one of the exercises we talked about and put it on your calendar. It can really help to find a specific block of time (maybe around an hour) that is currently open so you can fit it into your busy schedule.

The more you experiment with affiliate marketing techniques, the more they will become second nature! We also recommend creating a private list of every username, password, and affiliate link you sign up for so it is easy to find when you need it.